Nostalgia for Edinburgh's ‘good old days’ should carry a health warning - Donald Anderson
Capital of the Mind by James Buchan is one of my all-time favourite books and tells of Edinburgh’s finest hour in which the enlightenment helped create the modern world.
It’s an amazing book, which everyone interested in Edinburgh should read, but it also records the extraordinary death toll people suffered in those ‘good old days’ of 1745.
It records that of 1463 people buried in the city’s kirkyards and West Kirk that year, 290 had died of consumption, 270 of fever, 141 of smallpox, 108 of “chin-cough” — whooping cough or diphtheria — and 98 of measles. Another 81 deaths were attributed simply to “teething”. Teething was a leading cause of death back then.
These are astonishing figures for what was still a relatively small city. Disease and death, particularly among children, frighteningly commonplace.
Compare that with modern Scotland. In the whole of Scotland in 2025 there were just 28 confirmed cases of measles — and not a single death. Diphtheria, once a terrifying childhood killer, produced no cases at all in Scotland in 2025. Public Health Scotland notes that vaccination has made the disease rare in Britain.
Tuberculosis - the modern name for consumption and for which my eldest brother was hospitalised for many months as child - has not disappeared. Scotland recorded 298 notifications in 2025, but in 1745 it accounted for almost one death in five among those buried in Edinburgh’s recorded kirkyards.
The transformation since is perhaps humanity’s greatest achievements and was delivered by the enlightenment Edinburgh and Scotland created following the dark days of 1745.
We owe an enormous debt to scientists: Edward Jenner’s pioneering smallpox vaccination; Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin and the many researchers who subsequently developed safe vaccines and turned antibiotics into effective medicines. Buchan’s chilling snapshot of Edinburgh reminds us how far we have travelled.
Kings, generals and politicians may fill our history books, yet measured simply by the number of ordinary human lives saved, the scientists who conquered so many infectious diseases deserve to stand among history’s greatest heroes.